Pennsylvania Omnibus (40 page)

Dawn Beachy couldn’t remember
ever seeing a barn raising. She surely must have watched several as a young
girl, but if she had, she couldn’t now remember them. For her, this was a very
special day. A perfect day. And for a time, she was able to put the other
world, and the war that had killed her husband Ben, out of her mind.

She looked up at Jed, up at the
very top of the barn, sitting astride the center beam like he was riding a
horse. Men were handing up roof rafters and Jed was hammering them into place,
one after another.

Dawn smiled. This was the life
she wanted to live, and this was the man she wanted to live it with.

Before noon, the frame of the
barn was already in place, and when the midday meal was called, the siding was
already beginning to go up.

A light and perfect breeze
accented the day, moving just lightly enough to keep everyone cool in the
bright sunlight, and the smell of mown grass, cut lumber, and roasted chicken
mixed in the air.

The women were laughing and
clearing the long wooden tables of empty platters and bowls when the first
sounds of war were heard.

Dawn was doing what many of the
young ladies had done just after the dinner was over. She was the last of the
ladies who’d climbed up a very tall ladder to the peak of the new barn so that
she could look out over New Pennsylvania from the very top. Jed was seated on
the center beam, straddling it and nailing in a rafter, when he turned and saw
Dawn looking at him with a big smile on her face.

“Get ye down before ye hurt ye
by fallin’!” Jed said with a laugh.

“I just wanted to see what all
the fuss was about,” Dawn said with a playful smile on her face.

“It’s just a barn,” Jed
said.

Dawn laughed. “Oh, so you think
all those single Amish beauties just climbed this rickety ladder one after
another to look at a barn?”

“What else is there to look
at?” Jed asked.

“
Jedediah Troyer
, that’s
what!” Dawn said.

“Oh, get ye down!”

A low rumble shook the ground
just then, and both Jed and Dawn looked up as a formation of maybe a dozen or
more white drones, spherical and without markings, appeared over the high
perimeter wall that ringed the Amish Zone.

“Dawn, get down!” Jed shouted.
But Dawn, like everyone else who saw the sight, was frozen in place.

Just then, an attack craft—from
Jed’s point of view it had to be a TRACE fighter—sped from his left and engaged
the drones, shooting two of them down in a shower of laser light and sparks.
The two drones exploded and spun toward the ground, crashing in balls of fire
and smoke.

One of the drones dropped
precipitously, then shot back upward and fired a long volley of phosphorescent
projectiles that struck the TRACE fighter and blew it out of the sky.

Now chaos reigned. Explosions
rocked the ground, and more drones appeared on the horizon. An endless number,
seeming to stretch from one end of the heavens to the other.

“Dawn!” Jed yelled, and she
looked up and caught his glance. “Please get down!” he hollered, as four TRACE
fighters zoomed overhead and then banked toward the approaching drones.

“You too!” Dawn shouted, but
not before a flash of laser light split the air near her, sending crackling
electricity like lightning through the air. She was halfway down the ladder
when another explosion hit Matthias’s little house, and almost at the same
instant several of the buggies were struck and exploded, cartwheeling through
the air before crashing down to the earth in splinters.

Another drone crashed nearby,
and Dawn looked up in time to see three more TRACE fighters zip overhead at an
extremely high speed. By now, Amish families were gathering together, and the
parents were leading their children to run and hide—rushing to anywhere that
might offer them safety. Dawn saw a family running across a field of low, green
tobacco, and could only watch as a large TRACE ship crash-landed right in front
of them. The family stared for a moment, and then turned and ran the other
way.

The ship was huge, and Dawn was
thankful that it hadn’t exploded on impact. As it was, the crash landing had
gouged up several acres of cropland. She shook her head and stared out at the
confusion and destruction. War had erupted in the Amish Zone, and death and
destruction now rained down from the sky. This certainly wasn’t the first time
a devilish government had unleashed its military to try destroy the Amish—but
for those who were experiencing it, the scene was like none they’d ever
imagined.

The Amish are raised on stories
of persecution and violence. They know the tales by heart from the time they
are children in the crib. They’ve always known that such things have happened
often enough in the past. But the human mind is alike in every race and sect of
people: when the danger isn’t close enough, or when enough generations have
passed so that the reality of hardship and persecution ceases to be real, the
threats fade. They take on the quality of interesting fiction. But now, on this
Saturday, as the blood of saints and tyrants began to mingle in the soil of New
Pennsylvania, the ghosts and pains of the past took on new life for the
residents of the Amish Zone.

From the wreckage of the downed
TRACE aircraft, Dawn saw a figure appear. Old, and bowed down a bit from age
and circumstance, the figure crawled out of the fighter and began to walk
stoically toward the new barn.

Amos
.

Dawn began to run toward her
friend, but she’d only taken a few steps when she remembered that Jed was still
atop the barn. She skidded to a stop and swung around just in time to see a
phosphorescent projectile split the center beam of the barn—which gave way
under Jed’s weight.

Dawn’s eyes met Jed’s for just
a moment as he began to fall, but in an instant he had flipped over backward
and plummeted to the ground, landing beyond her view. Her breath caught in her
throat and her hands came up to her mouth and she had to look away. As she did,
she saw that Amos was running toward her with a hand outstretched. He got to
her just as she pushed away and ran inside the barn.

As the two friends stepped over
a portion of the shattered beam, they saw Jed lying in the rubble. He was
bloody, and he looked for all the world like he was dead.

A buggy pulled by two galloping
black horses sped up the lane and then turned into the drive at Matthias’s
farm. Black buggies were everywhere: some scattered as horses bolted in fear,
some shattered from explosions, and others being used by Amish farmers to get
their families to safety.

Eagles was driving the horses
hard, and Pook and Ducky were crammed into the buggy, holding on for dear life.
Another buggy backed out into the drive as an Amish man tried to get control of
his horses, and to avoid a collision Eagles turned the horses through a hedge.
Their buggy nearly launched into the air as it crashed through the bushes and
slid across the lawn, and the weight of the three militia soldiers, all thrown
against one side of the buggy, flipped the vehicle over, separating it from the
horses, who broke and ran across the field in terror.

Just as another buggy pulled up
next to the destroyed one, Pook Rayburn kicked open the side door of the
crashed vehicle—the side door which was now pointed straight upward toward the
sky—and he and Ducky crawled stiffly out of the wrecked pile of wood and metal.
Once they’d made their way to the ground, they checked one another for injuries
and, finding none, looked around to see what might have happened to Eagles. But
the salvager was nowhere in sight. Two of the Yoder boys climbed out of the
newly arrived buggy and joined Ducky and Pook next to the wreckage.

They all looked at one another
and started to walk around the wrecked buggy when they saw the whole shattered
vehicle shift and move. From the midst of the debris, Eagles stood slowly to
his feet. He had splinters and pieces of shrapnel in his beard, and there was
blood running down one side of his face. The wild man spat his wad of green
tobac on the busted-up buggy and then looked up at Pook, Ducky, and the Yoder
boys.

“Taadaa?” he said.

Pook found the rest of his
squad, along with Dawn, his supreme commander Amos Troyer, and an injured and
unconscious Jedediah Troyer, huddled next to the damaged and smoking skeleton
that used to be Matthias’s house.

Pook rushed to his team and did
a quick numbers check to make sure everyone was accounted for.

“Where’s Billy?” Dawn asked

“He had to stay behind to
finish a critical task,” Pook answered. “But we don’t have time to talk about
that. We have to get all of us, especially Amos, outside of the Amish Zone, and
we only have about twenty minutes left before it’ll be too late.”

“I don’t understand,” Dawn
said. “Is Transport going to destroy the AZ and kill everyone? Because if they
are, we need to fight!”

“I’ll explain it all when we’re
on the move,” Pook said. He began to shout orders to his squad, then he pointed
at Eagles and Ducky and told them to locate a working buggy.

“Load Jed into it and get him
outside the walls as quickly as you can,” he said. “The rest of us will find
our way out and meet you due east of the AZ in the next thirty minutes. Got
it?”

Eagles and Ducky nodded and
rushed off to complete their orders.

“Okay, the rest of you, we’re
going to hoof it out of here. The Amish are going to need as many of these
buggies as possible to use as ambulances, so we’re going to have to double-time
it out of the Zone on foot.” He turned to Amos. “Except you, sir. We need you
out for certain. You’ll ride with Jed.”

“No,” Amos said, and closed his
eyes.

“What do you mean?” Pook asked.
“We need to get you out of here.”

“I’m staying.”

“Sir, you can’t.” Pook put his
hands on his hips, ready to dig in if Amos wanted to argue.

“You don’t
tell
me what
I
can’t do
, officer,” Amos snapped. “I know what you have planned, and
it may work; but if it does, someone needs to stay on this side who knows
what’s going on.”

“But…” Pook said. “But… who
will command if you’re gone?”

Amos put his hand on Pook’s
shoulder. “
You
will, son.”

“Wait,” Dawn interrupted. “I
don’t understand what’s happening! Where is Amos going? Why are we fleeing the
Zone?”

Pook turned to Dawn and reached
out to hold her by the shoulders, steadying her. “Because in twenty
minutes—less than that now—there’s going to be an explosion and a blinding
white light in the sky over the Zone. That’ll be an okcillium explosion, and it
will cause something very much like an electromagnetic pulse. It will destroy
anything in the air in a fifty-mile radius, including every warship or drone on
both sides of this battle. They’ll all crash to the ground.”

Just as he said “crash,” a
drone that had been shot down by a TRACE fighter crashed in the neighbors’
field, sending forth a shower of sparks, fire, and smoke. Pook waited until the
sound died down before he spoke again.

“And then, immediately after
that, there’ll be a smaller explosion, but you won’t see or hear that one.
You’ll only see the results.”

“What… what will happen? What
will we see?” Dawn asked.

“This whole place,” Pook
answered, pointing all around them. “The whole Amish Zone, and everything in
it, is going to disappear.”

“Disappear?” Dawn said. “But
where will it go?”

Pook shook his head, shrugged,
and began to walk away, shouting orders to his men. Then he stopped and took a
step back toward Dawn before reaching out and taking her by the hand.

“We don’t know for sure,” he
said. “Maybe a hundred years in the future. Maybe the past? Can’t be sure. But
it’ll go someplace.”

Dawn held Pook’s hand tightly,
not about to let him leave again.

“Why don’t we just go with it?”
she asked. “Go with the Zone to wherever it ends up?”

Pook pulled on her hand and the
two began to walk. “Because if we want to have any opportunity, any opportunity
at all, to finish this for final and for good… then we have to stay here, in
this
time, and figure it out.”

NOW

Jed rocked back and forth beneath
the wide blue sky. He was lying on his back, a green soldier’s blanket laid
over his chest, as he was carried on a stretcher held aloft by four men. He saw
the beautiful wispy clouds, some connected by gossamer threads of vapor and
others seemingly more solid, like great billowy ships adrift in a heavenly sea,
and he felt the rhythm of the swaying as the men walked. He had a headache,
there was no denying that, and he could hear the people who traveled with him
talking as the group moved.

“The only portal left is up on
the Shelf, and now with the AZ gone, it’s our only hope.” It was Pook Rayburn
talking, and Jed smiled when he recognized the voice. He’d grown to like Pook
while working with him on the farm over this past week. He closed his eyes and
focused his attention on the voices, hoping that by doing so maybe the headache
would fade.

“It’s a long haul, but we’ll
make it.” This time it was Dawn Beachy speaking. “We don’t really have any
other choice.”

“I hope he’s going to be able
to walk at least part of the way,” a third voice said.

Jed’s brain had learned to work
as if the BICE was still there, providing him visual input so that the newer,
higher-functioning areas of his mind could interpret data. On one screen, an
image was displayed. It showed a large empty area, devoid of hills or valleys,
where the Amish Zone should have been. It was as if the whole community had
just disappeared. He didn’t know how he knew that this had once been where the
Amish Zone was, but he did. Even the immense walls were completely gone. On
another screen he was seeing the process of okcillium being extracted from
reclaimed road base, back in the old world. On still another screen, he
examined maps and data that appeared to show a location up on the Great Shelf.
All of these things—except for the image of the empty space where the Amish
Zone had been—were things his brain already knew. His mind was simply using a
new process for interpreting and organizing data, having learned this method
from working with the BICE.